For PlayStation Now streaming, the devil’s in the unknown details

Questions about game selection, pricing, and server quality remain unanswered.

The exact size and makeup of that "library of games" is going to be quite important to Now's success.

Over 18 months after purchasing streaming game company Gaikai, Sony finally announced a summer launch date for its own streaming game service—PlayStation Now—at CES this week. I got to check out a demo of the service running on a Bravia TV and PlayStation Vita on the show floor, and at first I was pretty impressed. The games ran with no discernible lag between button input and on-screen action, and while there were some video compression artifacts and color clumping from the streaming process, the 720p image looked decent enough.

Then I asked a nearby representative where exactly these games were being streamed from. "Oh, we have a Gaikai server running down the hall" he replied nonchalantly.

The representative went on to explain that external Internet access was not ideal on the crowded CES show floor and that the company wanted to provide a proof of concept for the service rather than a "live" demonstration. That's all well and good, but a demo streamed from a local server tells users almost nothing about what the PlayStation Now experience will be like in the real world.

A quick demonstration of PlayStation Now from the CES show floor.

Local game streaming, like that being shown by Sony at CES, is close to a solved problem at this point in time. Taking a game from one part of the house and displaying/controlling it in another part of the house over your local router isn't perfect, but it provides an acceptable, "good enough" game experience. That's why the likes of Steam, the Nvidia Shield, the PlayStation Vita, and the Vita TV are getting support for local streaming added to their software and hardware.

Streaming games running on remote Internet servers is another matter entirely. OnLive is the only company so far to try to sell such remote-streamed game access on a large scale (Gaikai's pre-Sony service was mainly focused on quick access to free demos) and suffered plentyof problemswith input latency and image quality for its efforts. Average Internet speeds and server technology have improved since 2010, but it remains to be seen whether today's thicker pipes can get latency down to the point where it's not noticeable for an average action game.

We may get to that point eventually, and it's not hard to see a revolution in gaming following. Being able to play graphically intense games with nothing but a "smart" monitor, an Ethernet jack (or even a good Wi-Fi connection), and a wireless controller could be much more attractive than investing in high-end local hardware that has to be upgraded regularly. That goes double if it means accessing those games instantly without having to go to the store or endure a long download. Regardless of whether the infrastructure is there yet, Sony is smart to put itself in a position to capitalize on this potential revolution if and when it does materialize.

If that revolution is going to happen, though, smart pricing and game availability are going to be key to bringing it about. Sony showed off three PS3 games being streamed on the CES show floor (The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, and God of War: Ascension) but refused to discuss any details about what specific games would be available when the service launches or how much those games would cost.

The company did hint at its CES keynote and in an accompanying blog post that the PlayStation Now would allow for both rentals and "a subscription that will enable you to explore a range of titles." It's that subscription service that really has the potential to turn the gaming world on its head in the same way that Netflix disrupted the market for home movies.

However, it can only do that if Sony is willing to put in the effort to offer a truly massive range of legacy titles for the service and if the electronics giant is willing to provide them at an affordable price. To really make PlayStation Now attractive, Sony should do everything it can to get subscribers access to hundreds of years-old titles that are no longer seeing significant sales either in shops or online. Recent releases are nice, but they don't need to be a big part of a successful all-you-can-stream subscription if that's what it takes to keep monthly fees down, as services like Netflix have shown.

Ideally, the PlayStation Now collection would extend back into Sony's massive back-catalog of PS1 and PS2 games as well as PS3 titles; Sony is currently saying that those older systems will be supported "down the road." The affordable PlayStation Plus and its ever-expanding downloadable Instant Game Collection is a good sign that Sony might be able to get this right, but it's not a guarantee that PlayStation Now's "range of titles" will be as big as it needs to be to really attract subscribers.

Despite a flashy show floor demo, we can't evaluate the worth of PlayStation Now when crucial questions about latency, price, and game availability remain unanswered. It's the answers to these questions that will ultimately determine whether the service becomes a must-have differentiator for Sony or a quickly forgotten dud come summer time.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.